tease Rafe and Justin, I think. So, when you ate them without a murmur and asked for more, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what, exactly-you covered it very well-but I couldn’t simply dismiss it. The only alternative explanation I could come up with was that, incredible though it seemed, you weren’t Lexie.”
“So you set a trap for me,” I said. “The Brogan’s thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a trap,” Daniel said, with a touch of asperity. “More of a test. It was a spur-of-the- moment thing. Lexie had no particular feelings about Brogan’s either way-I’m not sure she’d ever been there- which didn’t seem like something an impostor would know; you might have found out her likes and dislikes, but hardly her indifferences. The fact that you got it right, and the Elvis comment, reassured me. But then there was last night. That kiss.”
I went cold all over, till I remembered I didn’t have the mike on me. “Lexie wouldn’t have done that?” I asked coolly, leaning over to put out my smoke on the flagstones.
Daniel smiled at me, that slow sweet smile that made him suddenly handsome. “Oh, she would have,” he said. “The kiss was very much in character-and very nice, if I may say so.” I didn’t blink. “No, it was your reaction to it. For a split second, you looked stunned; utterly shocked at what you had done. Then you recovered and made some airy comment, and found an excuse to move away-but, you see, Lexie would never have been shaken by that kiss, not even for a second. And she would certainly never have drawn back at that point. She would have been…” He blew thoughtful smoke rings up into the ivy. “She would have been,” he said, “triumphant.”
“Why?” I asked. “Had she been trying to make something like that happen? ” My mind was fast-forwarding through the video clips; there had been flirting with Rafe and Justin but never with Daniel, not a hint, but that could have been a bluff, to mislead the others-
“That,” Daniel said, “is what gave you away.”
I stared at him.
He ground out the cigarette under his foot. “Lexie was both incapable of thinking about the past,” he said, “and incapable of thinking more than one step into the future. This may be one of the few things you overlooked. Not your fault; that level of simplicity is hard to imagine, and also hard to describe. It was as startling as a deformity. I seriously doubt that she would have been able to plan a seduction; but, once something had happened, she would have seen no reason to be shocked by it and certainly no reason to stop there. You, on the other hand, were clearly trying to gauge the consequences this might have. I’d guess that you have a boyfriend, or a partner, in your own life.”
I didn’t say anything. “So,” Daniel said, “I rang the police headquarters this afternoon, once the others had gone out, and asked where I could find Detective Sam O’Neill. The woman I spoke to couldn’t find an extension for him at first, but then she checked some directory and gave me a number to ring. She said, ‘That’s the Murder squad room.’ ”
He sighed, a small, tired, final sound. “Murder,” he said quietly. “So then, you see, I knew.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, again. All day, while we drank coffee and got on each other’s nerves and bitched about our hangovers, while he sent the others off to the pictures and sat in Lexie’s small dimming bedroom waiting for me, he had been carrying this alone.
Daniel nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see that.”
There was a long silence. Finally I said, “You know I need to ask you what happened.”
Daniel took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. Without them his eyes looked blank, blind. “There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. ‘Take what you want and pay for it, says God.’ ”
The words fell into the silence under the ivy like cool pebbles into water, sank without a ripple. “I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could possibly be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”
He put the glasses on and looked at me calmly, tucking the handkerchief back into his shirt pocket. “It seems to me,” he said, “that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only ‘Take what you want, says God’; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone’s outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that’s come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can’t afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture-theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth.”
He didn’t sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. “I don’t consider this anything to become incensed about,” he said, reading my look. “In fact, it shouldn’t be remotely surprising to anyone. We’ve taken what we wanted and we’re paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man- what’s his name? the prime minister-comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television,” he added, a little peevishly. “We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle and blinked at me through the lenses. “I have always accepted,” he said simply, “that there is a price to pay.”
“For what?” I said. “What do you want?”
Daniel considered this-not the answer itself, I think, but how best to explain it to me-in silence. “At first,” he said eventually, “it was more a matter of what I didn’t want. Well before I finished college, it had become clear to me that the standard deal-a modicum of luxury, in exchange for one’s free time and comfort-wasn’t for me. I was happy to live frugally, if that was what it took, in order to avoid the nine-to-five cubicle. I was more than willing to sacrifice the new car and the sun holidays and the-what are those things?-the iPod.”
I was on the edge of my nerves already, and the thought of Daniel on a beach in Torremolinos, drinking a technicolor cocktail and bopping along to his iPod, almost made me lose it. He glanced up at me with a faint smile. “It wouldn’t have been much of a sacrifice, no. But what I failed to take into account is that no man is an island; that I couldn’t simply opt out of the prevailing mode. When a specific deal becomes standard throughout a society-reaches critical mass, so to speak-no alternatives are readily available. Living simply isn’t actually an option these days; either one becomes a worker bee, or one lives on toast in a wretched bedsit with fourteen students directly overhead, and I wasn’t particularly taken with that idea either. I did try it for a while, but it was practically impossible to work with all the noise, and the landlord was this sinister old countryman who kept coming into the flat at the oddest hours and wanting to chat, and… well, anyway. Freedom and comfort are at a high premium just now. If you want those, you have to be willing to pay a correspondingly high price.”
“Didn’t you have other options?” I said. “I thought you had money.”
Daniel gave me a fishy stare; I gave him a bland one back. Eventually he sighed. “I believe I’d like a drink,” he said. “I think I left-Yes, here it is.” He had leaned sideways to feel under the bench, and I was braced and ready before I knew it-there was nothing handy that could make a weapon, but if I whipped ivy in his face, it might give me enough of a start to get to the mike and yell for backup-but he came back up with a half-full whiskey bottle. “I brought it out here last night, and then forgot it in all the excitement. And there should be-Yes.” He brought out a glass. “Will you have some?”
It was good stuff, Jameson’s Crested Ten, and God knows I could have used a drink. “No, thanks,” I said. No unnecessary risks; this guy was a whole lot smarter than your average bear.
Daniel nodded, examined the glass and bent to rinse it in the trickle of water. “Have you ever considered,” he inquired, “the sheer level of fear in this country?”
“Not on a regular basis,” I said. I was having a hard time keeping track of the thread of this conversation, but I knew Daniel well enough to know that he was going somewhere with this and he would get there in his own sweet time. We had maybe forty-five minutes before Faure ran out, and I’ve always been good at letting the suspect run the show. No matter how strong you are or how controlled, keeping a secret-I should know-gets heavy after a while, heavy and tiring and so lonely it feels lethal. If you let them talk, all you need to do is nudge them now and then, keep them pointing in the right direction; they’ll do the rest.
